The present invention is directed to a voice characteristic memory system for use in an electronic digital organ. In particular, the invention is directed to a programmable voice characteristic memory system which can be selectively and conveniently programmed to provide a virtually unlimited number of voices at the fingertips of the organist or organ designer.
An organ voice is the timbre or harmonic tone structure of the musical tone generated by the organ. Voices are generally characterized as diapason, flute, reed, string, special effects and so forth. The complete listing of voices in an organ is referred to as the organ specification.
Heretofore, the specification of an electronic digital organ was "hard wired" into a non-programmable memory such as a ROM. To alter the specification of such an organ, it was necessary to replace the ROM at the factory. The specification could not be directly and conveniently altered by the organist without providing relatively complex additional circuitry. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,515,792 to Deutsch, 3,610,799 to Watson and 3,755,608 to Deutsch.
Various "capture combination" systems for combining voices in an organ specification are also known in the art. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,733,593 to Molnar and 3,926,087 to Griffis. These systems are merely directed to techniques for facilitating selection of various combinations of organ stops without affecting the voices stored in the organ specification memory.
A primary advantage of the present invention is that it facilitates rapid, convenient alteration of an organ specification either voice by voice or all voices in gross.
Another advantage of the invention is that it provides for the recordal of the voice characteristic information of a particular organ specification in an external non-volatile memory for convenient storage and retrieval by the organist.
A further advantage of the invention is that it provides a virtually unlimited number of voices for use by the organist.
Other advantages appear hereinafter in the following disclosure.